Everyone seems to be on psychedelics except me

Mental Health Training

Everyone seems to be on psychedelics except me.

People will go to the unlikeliest of places to sort their heads out, be it the internet,

the rainforests of the Amazon, or even suburbia in London, UK.

Like noticing the first grey hairs, I suppose there comes a time in midlife when many of us think: is everyone on drugs but me? These rude awakenings of ageing are inevitable – I just hadn’t counted on them coming to me exactly the same time. There I was, at the hairdresser’s for my biannual root touch-up, when the nice woman charged with making me blonde again – let’s call her Claire,

announced that she would have to use a more “icy” blonde tone to help mask the proliferation of greys coming through.

Perhaps noticing the shock on my face, she changed the subject and asked how my Christmas was. I mumbled some platitudes about it being lovely, thank you very much, before asking how hers was. “Eventful,” smiled Claire. “I went on a guided ayahuasca trip as a present to myself.

Now she really had my attention.

“It’s a South American psychoactive plant that gives you this intense spiritual experience,” she continued. “It was mind-blowing. Eye-opening. It takes you into another dimension and lets you see how connected we are.

“Goodness,” I said. “Where did you go to do it? Peru? Brazil? Chile?” “Oh no!”, she replied. “I went to see a shaman in Croydon.”

Regular readers will know that I’m no prude when it comes to drugs, having tried a fair few before giving them up several years ago. And yet, even this reformed drug addict is shocked by how normal it seems to have become for people to announce that they have spent the weekend casually taking psychedelics.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the news will have noticed that Prince Harry has admitted to taking ayahuasca and magic mushrooms. In California, where I went at the beginning of January to interview him, I felt very old indeed as I saw the number of high-end shops selling fancy clutch bags that would have been just the thing had they not been a) 600 dollars and then monogrammed, with words such as “WEED”, “GUMMIES” and “EDIBLES”.

Back in the UK, I relayed this information to a similarly middle-aged, middle-class friend, who laughed at me patronisingly. “Bryony,” he said, pouring himself a glass of merlot, “everyone does edibles nowadays, honey”.

“Well, I don’t!” I said haughtily, clutching my glass of water. “You may not, but I can assure you that people are microdosing their way through life’s drudgery with chocolate-covered mushrooms they have ordered off the internet all over the country.”

As someone who had to give up drugs for their mental health, I found all this a bit much. But I was obviously taking the wrong drugs. Last week, a study reported that a single dose of DMT – the psychedelic found in ayahuasca – might effectively treat people with severe depression.

The 34 subjects in the trial were given an I V drip of DMT, causing them to experience a 20-minute psychedelic “trip”. They were then given therapy to help them make sense of the process. Six in 10 were declared depression-free three months later.

This kind of study is fascinating because, for decades, most research into treatment for depression has been sluggish, to say the least, slowed down by the unstoppable march of mass-marketed antidepressants. As Dr David Erritzoe, a clinical psychiatrist at Imperial College London and the study’s chief investigator noted: “For patients who are unfortunate to experience little benefit from existing antidepressants, the potential for rapid and durable relief from a single treatment, as shown in this trial, is very promising.”

What does this mean? Should we all be out picking mushrooms? Or taking guided ayahuasca trips with so-called shamans on the outskirts of south London?